To hear the press talk about it, the Trump Department of Justice has very little to do with justice. It’s a place where the president and his allies make a call and get his political enemies prosecuted — and his political allies taken care of.
Of course this is just a liberal political narrative, and what the press really wants is a Department of Justice beholden to the deep state that undermines a president they don’t like. Unfortunately, this endless media drumbeat surrounding Trump’s supposed South American approach to the law may have tricked actual South American countries into believing that their approach to dirty justice can work just as well in Washington.
Recent reporting by the main newspaper in Buenos Aires, La Nacion, alleges that the Argentine government tried to convince Attorney General Pam Bondi that she should open a criminal investigation into investors on the New York Stock Exchange who got ripped off by Argentina’s prior socialist government. (It’s a case I’ve written about before, as one of the attorneys for the cheated investors.)
The investor litigation has been going on for almost a decade in New York, and it stems from the socialist government of Cristina Kirchner renationalizing their state oil company, YPF, and refusing to abide by the contractual protections that made YPF’s prior privatization possible. It went to trial, and a federal judge in Manhattan concluded that Argentina was responsible for over $16 billion of damages when they thumbed their noses at their contractual obligations.
Two liberal judges on the Second Circuit — led by Judge Denny Chin, of E. Jean Carroll fame — reversed the judgment this past spring. They concluded that Argentina’s laws excusing its illegal conduct trump Congress’s decision that this sort of foreign-government malfeasance should be heard in American courts. If Argentina ripped them off, the court suggested, the New York victims should seek justice in Buenos Aires.
Of course the last time they tried to go to court in Argentina, their white-shoe American lawyers were informed that they were under criminal investigation. It was just the sort of gangsterism that was endemic in places like socialist Argentina and not especially surprising.
What is surprising is that the Argentine government may have tried to do the same thing in the United States. Conjuring up an Old World conspiracy theory to describe standard commercial litigation, La Nacion claims that the Argentine government went to the Trump administration and requested that they open their own criminal investigation into the YPF litigation as a fraud perpetrated by prominent financiers in Argentina.
Perhaps it was because they read the hyperventilating American political press about the Trump Justice Department, or perhaps they simply assumed that all regimes are, at heart, gangster regimes, the Argentines apparently tried to make the same play here that they did in Argentina. They wanted the weaponized criminal law to bully into submission those who would dare hold their socialist government to account.
Luckily, this is America and not Argentina. In spite of what Democrats may have claimed at Todd Blanche’s Senate hearings, you don’t get to walk into a meeting and say, “As an ally of President Trump I need you to investigate the people causing trouble for my government.”
The story nevertheless shows the lengths to which the Argentine government will go in order to avoid paying stiffed investors what it owes. It brings to the fore the fact that the whole sordid affair has been, on Argentina’s part, an exercise in South American gangsterism from the start, and that, regrettably, the socialist gangsterism goes so deep that even Javier Milei can’t stop it.
While it’s commendable that the Department of Justice doesn’t seem to have paid any heed to the Argentine conspiracy theories about the criminality of finance, the strongest message it can send against the poisonous legacy of South American socialism is to support the shareholders when they seek to have the judgment of the Second Circuit overturned by the Supreme Court. New York investors should be able to rely on the protections of New York laws and courts when they get swindled by foreign socialists.
America First means putting American investors first, not South American gangsters and their liberal enablers on the Second Circuit.